I love system functionality, it’s a great thing. It brings a rich and dynamic user experience or empowerment through seamless processes to get things done. Whether it be business functionality or technical functionality, we now have more system functionality at our finger tips than we’ve ever had.

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In the 1980’s BT offered a dial in bulletin board type service known as Prestel. It was a simple service based on Viewdata technology with a private electronic mail capability and was my first experience of being in an online networked environment. Prestel hosted the UK’s first home online banking service (Homelink). It was a basic service to say the least. You could view your account balance and pay specific utility bills but that was about it. At the time it was revolutionary, but today limiting your service to these features would be archaic.

Lets jump back to today when Internet banking is the norm and the range of banking functionality is enormous (I can wire transfer money anywhere in the World from anywhere in the World without delay, interruption and at minimal cost) and it starts to become obvious that retail banks, for a number of reasons, have dismantled their internal processes and controls and have brought them out of the back office and have put them right into every living room, coffee shop and street corner (a scale issue).

There’s no doubt that there are real rewards with giving you access to all this extra functionality and I’m a real fan of Internet banking myself. However, the problem comes when/if your account becomes compromised. Back in 1984 I really wasn’t bothered as Homelink really wouldn’t let you do that much therefore the damage was limited and the impact minimal. In today’s environment all bets are off and your account easily plundered or your Visa charged before you know what’s hit you.

And therein lies the rub. The more functionality we provide in information systems the more opportunity we create for nefarious or malicious activity to flourish. Add in the scale dimension and the problems start to be compounded even further. When I started this thread I argued that you could only ever have two elements from scale, functionality, and security and I still believe this to be true.

If this is the case how can we approach the security element in order to bring this vital element into the picture? If we can’t provide the right amount of security into highly scaled, functionally rich systems then how can the general public trust and embrace them? People will readily adopt new systems when they see a clear reward for changing their behaviour but will not go past the point where the risk outweighs the attached rewards.

My last post in this series will look at what we really mean, and can expect of security in this environment and what we as information security professionals and our Boards of Directors need to clearly understand about these realities.

(Postscript: Thinking about my first adventures with Prestel has brought back loads of memories. For those of us in the UK this cutting edge service significantly changed the IT security legal landscape. After Prince Philip’s Prestel e-mail account was compromised the Computer Misuse Act 1990 was introduced and I guess things have gone downhill ever since

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